Hi Bill:
I spent 7 years field service for SGI. You have 2 problems, neither can be
fixed.
1)The VME 100Mb (C8-100BT)interface turned out to be a piece of junk even
before IRIX 6.5 got hold of it. The board, as you said is only half duplex,
a seven year old design that never got a major rework because it's on a long
time dead product line. I had several sites that were never able to exceed
65Mb simplex.
2) IRIX 6.5 has made problems and performance worse that under IRIX 6.2
For systems under SGI support, GPS would swap out the C8-100BT board for a
FDDI (SAS/DAS) of their choice and Customer would use a CISCO, or alike, to
run a FDDI Fibre connection into a 100Mb switch. There are some kernel
parameters to tweak for this that I cannot remember for MTU. We did this
for 2 customers just in the Phila area alone because of the additional
problems IRIX 6.5.x created.
FIX,
Replace your Challenge with a O2100 and get reliable 100 & 1000Mb FDX
interfaces.
... All is my humble opinion, and not that of my previous employer
..jim
-----Original Message-----
From: Link, Bill (OTS-EDH) [mailto:Bill_Link@billing.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 4:57 PM
To: 'toasters(a)mathworks.com'
Subject: Slooow SGI Challenge
Has anyone had any experience with netapp on an SGI Challenge system?
I have an F760 attached through a cisco 4000 switch to an sgi challenge and
an IBM S7A. I have this arrangement on a dedicated subnet with all
interfaces set manually to 100tx. (The vme controller in the SGI will not
abide full duplex). The netapp is running 5.3.6R1, the SGI is running IRIX
6.5.5, and the RS6K is running AIX4.3.3.
The IBM will create a 128M file in under 30 sec. If I mount the filer on the
SGI box and specify tcp it takes about 2 min 45 sec to write the same file.
If I let the mount on the SGI default to udp it won't write more that 15 or
20 mb before it starts getting nfs timeouts. The filer seems oblivious to
any trouble that the sgi is having. The sgi will work (slowly) at 10mb half
duplex with udp.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Bill Link
SysAdmin
Output Technology Solutions
bill_link(a)billing.com